Solace blog

Delivering Social Impact

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Our vision at Places for People is ‘places work when they work for everyone’. Social impact is at the centre of everything we do to make a positive difference for people, places and planet. This blog gives a short overview of how we incorporate social impact into all aspects of our work.

Social Impact Approaches

The Places for People Group includes 20 complementary businesses and is one of the largest property, regeneration and leisure businesses in the UK. We currently own or manage 197,000 homes, run 120 leisure centres and have a significant development pipeline of over 25,000 homes.

Across our Group or businesses, we deliver social impact in three distinct ways. These include:

Creating social impact in the delivery of our work by providing training, apprenticeships and employment opportunities and building social impact in to requirements with supply chain contractors. .

Delivering social impact an output from our work by offering care and support, offering affordable credit, increasing the provision of affordable housing and running leisure centres which improve health and well-being.

Taking additional steps to deliver social impact including grants for community projects, social investment to charities and social enterprises, fundraising and volunteering.

We have a central function which is tasked with driving forward social impact across all our businesses and running our charitable foundation. All activities delivered align with our IMPACT principles which stand for innovative, measurable, purposeful, accessible, collaborative and transferable. Social impact is overseen by a board chaired by our Group Chief Executive who meets regularly to review progress and agree future priorities. This demonstrates the high profile and importance of social impact across our businesses.

Measuring Social Impact

Our Social Value Dashboard is an online platform that gathers data to track progress against goals and produce reports. Data in input by staff and automated from our other in house IT systems so it can then converted to values from recognised metric sets including HACT and the National Themes, Outcomes and Measures. The Dashboard provides real time data about social impact for all Group companies which enable us to track progress and make improvements to optimise our approach.

Five Tips for Success

Here are five practical tips for success based on our experience of delivering social impact activities which are relevant to other organisations that want to make a difference through their work.

Consider social impact in all your business activities.

Build in social impact requirements into supply chain contracts.

Take a 360 degree approach to social impact which includes finance, staff resources and effective use of all assets.

Involve customers in designing and shaping social impact activities.

Use data and feedback to learn and improve your social impact offer.

There are many pressing challenges facing society at the moment. We can all play a role in helping to address these challenges by building social impact into all aspects of our work to make a positive difference to the people, places and the planet.

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